Flykiller (11 page)

‘You felt it prudent to beat us here, Secrétaire,' said Louis, not backing off. ‘You had, I think, to take another look in case whoever left her identity card but not her handbag had also left something you had missed.'

‘Nothing … There was nothing else.'

‘No ration tickets? No residence permit?' They were all but shouting.

‘All right, all right! Those must have been in that overcoat you found, Kohler, and were taken from it, or were in her bag which has yet to be found, and yes, whoever killed her came back here afterwards to leave the card!'

‘And these?' asked Louis, removing the first of the freshened pillows to expose a neat little pink-ribboned bundle of letters in their scented envelopes.

‘Those weren't there when we found her
carte d'identit
é on Wednesday morning,' managed Bousquet, sickened by what must have happened. ‘We searched.
Mon Dieu
, but we did. Ménétrel insisted on accompanying me and at the time I realized those must have been what he was after, but they simply weren't there then.'

Not then. ‘So this unknown visitor must have come back?' asked Louis.

‘
Yes!
'

‘And recently, too,' said Kohler, indicating the curtains. ‘Had we not been here, Secrétaire, I wonder what might have happened to you? A big place like this and you here all on your own.'

‘And waterers of rabbits are killers, are they?'

He had a point. ‘Were no fingerprints taken after that visit?' demanded St-Cyr.

‘Ah! don't be so difficult. It was a crisis.'

‘And how, please, did you and the doctor find her
carte d'identit
é?'

‘Why should it matter?'

‘Just answer, please,' said Louis, keeping up the pressure.

‘On the bedside table, leaning up against that photograph of her husband.'

‘As a warning?'

‘As a reminder, perhaps, of our lost heroism. All right, it was deliberately left there for me, or so I felt at the time.'

‘Why you, Secrétaire?'

‘I … I don't really know.'

‘And Dr Ménétrel?'

‘Felt the same, I'm certain.'

‘A visit that was done after the killing and that anticipated your coming here,' said Louis. ‘And then another, which anticipated our own and yours again. It's odd, is it not?'

‘Look, people come and go in this place at all hours up to and even beyond the curfew. Anyone could have slipped in and out if asked to – the killer too, of course. Old Rigaud, the concierge, was having a hell of a time keeping track of the residents and finally went on strike. They were driving him crazy simply for the fun of it, so we had to let him stay on.'

‘Please wait downstairs or in your car, Secrétaire. Hermann and I won't be long.'

‘Will there be fingerprints on those?' He indicated the letters.

‘Other than the Maréchal's, Madame Dupuis's and those of any number of postal clerks, since the letters were mailed? Not likely, but they'll have to be dusted.'

‘Then don't tell the doctor what you've found. Let him continue to worry about them. Learn that it's always best to keep him in the dark and distracted.'

‘
Merde
, Louis, he's really edgy,' sighed Kohler when Bousquet had left them. ‘Does he think he's the target?'

‘He must, but does the killer or the one who took her to the Hall have a room here, Hermann, or do both of them? And is this what our secrétaire is now wondering since you so kindly pointed it out to him?'

‘Someone so close to each of them, he, she or they can come and go at will and all are targets.'

‘Pétain and his right hand; Laval and his. And why, please, did Monsieur Bousquet not drag along the local
flics
, eh? Look for little things, Hermann. Things that will tell us not only who our victim really was but why the Secrétaire Général de Police should have such a lapse of duty.'

‘Things that may have been missed by our visitor or left on purpose,
Dummkopf.
Things we might never know the reason for their being here but others will.'

A Saint Louis crystal perfume bottle was still in its presentation box, tucked away at the back of her dressing table drawer. Right inside the lid, and probably never read by Pétain, there was a note:
Maréchal, please accept this small token for your dear wife in recognition of our esteem and devotion to you both.
It was signed M. Jean-Paul Brisset and Mme Marie-Louise of 32a
bis
rue Dupanloup, Orléans. Though their numbers had dwindled, Pétain still regularly received such gifts from supporters all over the country. A bit of lacework from Normandy, a Sèvres soup tureen or vase, silver tea and coffee services, paintings too, signed and sent by their artists, books by their authors. All such things ended up in storage rooms at the stately home, the
maison de maître
, he had rented as a weekend retreat in the tiny village of Charmeil just six kilometres by road to the north-west of Vichy.

Céline Dupuis had obviously read the note and had carefully returned it to its place before shoving the box well out of sight.

Hermann was thumping a book he'd taken from the pile she'd been reading when time allowed …

‘
La Cuisinière Bourgeoise et Économique
, Louis. Well thumbed, somewhat tattered and probably published in 1890.'

The charming housewife on the cover wore a long, striped white and red dress, with white apron and frilly cap, but was holding a bloodied butcher's knife that was far more than needed to decapitate the chicken she'd just finished plucking for the steaming pot on the stove behind her.

‘But why learn to cook, Louis, unless you plan to leave here or at least to leave the profession you're in?'

The wicker hamper at the woman's feet had spilled a rush of vegetables on to the floor. Pots hung in the background; pots that now would have been commandeered for scrap metals!

‘Do you really need the reminder, eh? You know damned well people go to the films to watch the feasting, and that they read cookbooks that are centuries old just to taste the food they can only dream about.'

She hadn't heated the leftovers of some ‘coffee' in a pot on the simple electric ring that served for all cooking. There were three carrots in the little larder, a thin slice of questionable cheese, a bit of bread – the grey ‘National' everyone hated – two onions, a few cloves of garlic and some cubes of Viandox, a beef tea that was all but absent from the shops. Little else.

Her underwear, beyond a couple of pairs of pre-war silk, was nothing special, thought Kohler. Manufactured lace on the brassieres, a pair of black, meshed stockings she'd rolled up and had set aside to try to mend, a few slips and half-slips …

‘Blouses, Hermann. Part of a costume, perhaps. The uniform of a troupe. Look for ones with cheap, mother-of-pearl cufflinks that may have been left in. Her killer might have been a colleague.'

Kohler went quickly through the contents of the armoire. Evening dresses, halter-necked and off-the-shoulder ones, a couple of suits with trousers, a few skirts …

The flat box of pre-war cardboard, a gift, was lined with tissue paper, the halter-necked dress of a soft, silvery silk over which were panels of see-through, vertically pleated strands, each about three millimetres apart and five centimetres long, separated by horizontal panels of scalloped, sequined lace. A long strand of blue sapphires lay atop the dress. A fortune.

‘The earrings, Louis. Were they to have been worn with this?'

‘The shoes … There are leather high heels to match.'

‘She'd have looked fabulous in them.'

‘No attempt has been made to steal the sapphires.'

‘Then were these left for us to find along with the love letters?'

‘The perfume, Hermann. Unless I'm mistaken, it's the same as our sculptress wore. It's Shalimar, one of Guerlain's, and was a smash hit in 1925. Sandalwood, bergamot and jasmine, absolute rose and iris, but vanilla also and that is what set it off to create the sensation it did at the International Exhibition in the Grand Palais. Our victim was wearing it when killed. This cheap little phial was on her dressing table.'

‘And a hugely expensive dress from the twenties,' breathed Kohler. ‘Did de Fleury give it to her, and if so, why the hell didn't he tell her to wear it?'

‘You're forgetting the sapphires.'

‘And that she must have put the earrings on after de Fleury had let her out at the hotel.'

‘But were the necklace, the dress and the earrings all from the same person?'

‘Blue eyes and fabulous blue stones, Louis. Nice and dark.'

The strand was dangled. ‘Surely no
résistant
worth his salt would have left these when funds are so desperately needed by them?'

‘And the ID, Chief?'

‘Could well have been left by a
résistant
, yes.'

A tail feather from a male hen harrier had been used as a quill in an unsuccessful attempt at writing a postcard to the daughter. That of a pigeon had proved little better but the victim was, she had stated, ‘planning next to use those of the quail, the merlin and guinea fowl or even one from a peacock'.

The postcard was a photo of the Maréchal in uniform with the words of the song every schoolchild in the country had to sing each day during opening exercises. Maréchal,
nous voilà! Devant toi, le saveur de la France.
Marshal, here we are before you, France's saviour.
Nous jurons, nous, les gars, De servir et de suivre tes pars.
We, your ‘boys', swear to serve you and follow in your footsteps. For Pétain is France and France is Pétain!

And weren't they all now worried that the Resistance, the ‘terrorists' or some other unknown would
bousiller les gars
? Smash the boys, bump them off?

3

The morgue was nowhere near the Hotel du Parc, and certainly not within easy ‘walking' distance, swore Kohler silently. Well to the south of the old town, it was near the river and above the marshy flats into which the town's septic bed drained. A cruel breeze, out of the west, stirred the frozen reeds, bringing a thin dusting of snow and the stench. Over the snow-covered hills beyond the river, the light was like gunmetal, the frost so hard that the branches of the trees would snap and creak – had it been like that at Stalingrad when his boys had died? he wondered. Of course it had. Woodsmoke would rise, marking the site of a camp fire – Jurgen and Hans would have known this only too well by then and would have agreed that, huddled over cold ashes, any
maquisards
out there would freeze to death rather than show themselves.

War was like that, like Christ on a platter in cold storage.

‘Look, I know this won't sound right,' said Bousquet, cupping his hands as he lit the last of their cigarettes, the three of them standing but a few steps from the car whose engine idled, Georges, the driver, still behind the wheel and minding his own business because he'd been told to. ‘The second victim … Camille Lefèbvre. She and I … An evening or two. Ah! it was nothing, I tell you. A chance meeting at a local inn well before last Christmas, a small gathering, a few friends. Who would have thought anything would have developed? Certainly I didn't.'

‘Married?' snapped Kohler.

‘The daughter of an officer, one of the recently disbanded Army of the Armistice.'

Demobilized 21 November of last year.

‘I was careful. So very careful. One has to be in a little place like this and with a position such as mine.'

‘We're waiting,' sighed Louis, impatiently flicking his cigarette away and not bothering even to save it for his little tin. ‘You've not answered my partner's question.'

These two would think the worst but would have to be told. ‘We had agreed to meet downriver at one of the cabins the open-air cafés let to people in summer. Swimming, boating, water-cycling and sunbathing, that sort of thing, but closed in winter.'

‘Except that you've a year-long lease on this one,' muttered Kohler. It was just a shot in the dark but …

‘I hardly ever have the time to go there. Friends use it, my wife and family in summer when they come for a little visit.'

‘Hermann, ask him what he told those who needed to know where he'd be?'

‘En route to Paris. There were three rooms. Not big, quite small. She got up during the night. Perhaps she had to take a pee, perhaps she heard a shutter banging – one was loose. I awoke when I heard her struggling. I reached under the pillows for my gun and called out that I was armed. There … there was still a good fire in the kitchen stove, light from its firebox and from her torch which had fallen. She … she was lying in a heap on the floor, twitching. Her robe was open, the back door swinging in towards me. I fired into the night. Twice, I think. Maybe three times.'

‘The date and time?' grumbled Louis.

‘7 January, a Thursday at … at about 2.45 a.m.'

‘A Friday?'

‘Yes … Yes, it was Friday by then.'

‘Knifed, garrotted – what, exactly, Secrétaire?' demanded Louis, using that Sûreté voice of his.

‘Garrotted, the wire still embedded in her throat.'

‘And blood all over the place,' sighed Kohler. ‘The jugular, the carotid artery …' They'd seen it all in Avignon ten days ago. One of a group of madrigal singers, the Palais des Papes …

‘Her pessary had fallen out. I reached to pick it up but … but hesitated because I felt whoever had killed her would come back to finish the job.'

‘Footprints, Secrétaire? Two sets or one? A man and a woman or only …'